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Hejjjjj guys! It’s been a while – indeed, it’s been at least two months since I last posted here. If you didn’t see that post (which I won’t blame you for: I’d be glad to have any actual followers, considering the young age of this blog), my computer got brutally manslaughtered, and being some sort of OCD who hates typing and doing any actual work on mobile devices, I put the blog on hiatus. Oh, and a month-long trip was also part of the reason (or excuse). Anyway, after lots of troubles, I’ve managed to get myself a shiny new laptop to type on a day or two ago, which is now perfectly set up to revive the productive side of me. But before I delve into what I’m going to do, allow me to update you fellas a bit on what I’ve done and been doing:
Status of Polyglot Me©
- Tumblring, lots of tumblring: ever since the recommendation by a post on Fluent Language, I’ve turned my old Tumblr blog into a full-fledged…well, companion to this blog. It’s been a pleasure to interact with so many budding polyglots, around the same age as me, who’re very serious students and have their own opinions about things. Now I think I might be a bit addicted, so I won’t be stopping that anytime soon – so come follow me over there too!
- Signed up for Polyglot Gathering: I am incredibly excited to take part the yearly Polyglot Gathering in Berlin and to finally have a chance to be in such a large event along with hundreds of like-minded folks. It isn’t cheap for a student like me (already going broke thanks to Scandinavia), but I’m sure it’ll be worth it. By the time of writing there are still some places left, so GO SIGN UP NOW!
- Intensive Polish: how I wish I could write ‘polish my Polish’ here, but fact is I started formally studying the ‘scary’ Polish language around the time I finished my TISUS test, which makes around three months of study so far, or two excluding the month-long trip. Since it’s my first Slavic language (Russian doesn’t count because I dumped it :P), and since it’s just so insane of a tongue, fluent in three months is out of the question for me, unlike Swedish. I’ve also made it a so-called silent period, working only on Glossika and Anki intensively, but my first italki lesson just an hour ago showed some promising progress. More on that later!
- Brushed up my French and forgot even more German: since I travelled France for two weeks, of course I’d take the opportunity to speak nothing but French all the time. My French is still far from fluent – my body is resisting it for some reason (jk) – but now I can finally say I can converse in the language! My German isn’t so lucky though: with the lack of practice, it’s been getting suppressed by my Swedish more and more. Which brings me to:
- Starting studying in Swedish: as I said before, passing the TISUS test has given me the opportunity to enroll myself in Swedish courses, studying alongside Swedes, as opposed to my exchange students-only courses last semester. Currently I’m doing a bit of linguistics (phonetics to be exact) and musicology, though later I’ll also add some German to the mix. Some say this is very daring – but considering I’ve been studying in a foreign language almost all my life, my answer is still my favourite: why not?
So voila! Now as we turn to face the future, be sure to start following Rhapsody in Lingo, because there’ll be lots of content coming. In fact, here is a sneak peek of my plans:
What’s in store for RiL
Apparently I’ll be shorting the name from now on. Over the course of two months, while travelling around talking to people and also studying on my own, many many ideas have popped up in my mind that I’d really like to write about. They’re currently in my blog’s drafts section. *hint hint* These include things like
- more of my conception of language learning: since this is a blog dedicated to language learning, I will be writing more about my personal theories of language acquisition. Even though I’m no linguistics expert (yet), and even though I haven’t really been into this ‘hobby’ for as long as other polyglots are, I’ve formulated some ideas of my own when it comes to effective studying, which have worked quite well for me. So far I’ve written about language immersion, resources and (briefly) my view on language acquisition, but very soon I’ll actually write about how I’m doing it, which also plug into my personal ‘system’ quite well.
- travel blog…?: I started writing about my month-long trip throughout Germany back in summer, but apparently a long series of posts is not an easy thing to stick to or finish…I would still like to write about it though, seeing as it’s one of my favourite trips so far. But do tell me if you’d like me to finish it or not!
- progress updates and challenges: as mentioned, I’m currently working on Polish, so I will be updating you guys on how I’m doing, how I’m working on it, my resources and methods, etc. Besides, leading up to the Polyglot Gathering, I will most certainly be getting all my other lanaguages back to at least a usable level or hopefully even better, which I plan do so in form of month-long focused challenges. Watch out! (and join me if you would also like to do something similar!)
- resource reviews: if you haven’t noticed already, I plan to keep a personal tone on my blog, which means I’m always writing about what I think and what I do, instead of trying to sound like an authority. So in my reviews, I’ll focus on how well the resources fit into my learning style, or which learning styles they might suit, so that you may reference them when choosing resources. And last, but certainly not least:
- Bel Canton: this is a subsection of my blog that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I feel like my mother tongue, Cantonese, is quite an underrated language: it has no written standard, it’s said to be ridiculously hard, etc. But in my opinion what makes it fun (and perhaps even harder) is its constant evolution and creation of new slangs and references, propagated from the Internet into real life. I jotted down some ideas of what I can write about, and a meetup with Olly Richards helped me make up my mind to realise them. In this section I’ll focus mainly on sayings, which make the language so unique, as well as whatever I feel is missing from resources you can find on the Internet. As for the name…well, as you can see from my blog’s name, I like classical music puns, so…
And that’s it! I have a ton of ideas, so I will try my best to write consistently, and hope I won’t end up neglecting them and letting them go to waste. If the content mentioned above is what you’d like to read, please do let me know so that I am even more motivated to write it, just for you! A late happy new year, and I hope to see you again!
